From: Cristian Secară (orice@secarica.ro)
Date: Thu Jun 01 2006 - 15:25:32 CDT
On Mon, 29 May 2006 10:57:02 -0700, Doug Ewell wrote:
> The Romanian translation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
> -- which is probably not representative of text that would be sent
> via SMS -- yield the following sizes:
> 12,841 bytes in UTF-8
> 12,454 bytes in SCSU (3% decrease)
> 13,498 bytes in BOCU-1 (5% increase)
That is an interesting intelectual game, but unfortunately in practice
it is of zero interest.
What I want to say, is that it is too late.
Today, in my country (Romania), no one uses extended characters in SMS
messages, except, perhaps, just a handful of some bizarre people who
like bizarre (read: useless) experiments.
There are many reasons for this situation:
- extended characters are more difficult to access from a phone
keyboard, so very few people are willing to extend their typing time
- first mobile phone generations were unable to generate Romanian
specific characters with their keyboard, even if a received message
w/ accented characters was, in some cases, correctly displayed
- very few peoples are aware that their [modern] phone can write
Romanian specific characters
- modern mobile phiones are able to write correctly, BUT there are a
couple of conditions for this:
- the phone should have Romanian language included; this is usually
true _only_ if that phone is sold officially in shops and it does
usually not apply for phones purchased in whatever other country
- the phone's menu should be set to Romanian; many young phone users
are keeping their phone menu in English language, because so is
"cool"
- some users will not attempt to actually use extended Romanian
characters when sending a SMS message, because they do not know if the
addressee's phone is able to display properly those characters; this
fear comes from computer usage, where this situation IS surprisingly
true (Yahoo mail is the best example)
- on TV there is (or was until recently) an avalanche of SMS user
feedback for any immagineable TV program; I know for sure that almost
all in-house built SMS software (used for on-screen display) are not
able to handle UCS-2 characters from SMS; in fact, associate SMS
software producers are not aware that such a situation even exist (i.e.
16 bit per character in SMS messages), or have o idea about technical
details, like how to recognize if a random received message is 8 bit or
16 bit
- very few peoples, like me, who know all those details, prefer _not_ to
send SMS w/ extended characters, because the 70 character size
limitation of a 16 bit SMS message is aberrant and shameless doubles+
the price
- should I mention that, if I write a message from my PC (using the
software that came with my phone, otherwise a powerful program) with
U+0218-021B Romanian characters, all phones will display blank squares
for these characters on the received message ?
> Cristian can probably supply a more appropriate sample text for
> comparison.
I think I can provide some, but why ?
Cristi
-- Cristian Secară http://www.secarica.ro/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Jun 01 2006 - 15:29:19 CDT